After the Fireworks
by Allekha
Summary: The Huns are defeated; China is saved. Until something worse follows.


A/N: Written for Ghostie for Trick-or-Treat 2014 and finally crossposted. Rated T for character death and graphic descriptions.

* * *

With the defeat of the Huns, everything slowly went back to normal.

For about three weeks.

Then they started to follow.

At first it was just the odd story from a soldier posted to the wall: a man or woman who came stumbling along, stiff and ill-looking, eyes blank, refusing to reply to questions. Many of them became agitated and had to be killed, but it often took many blows before they went down.

Then they came in trickles of two or three, and sometimes the guards that dealt with them became ill as well: first they fell comatose, and when they awakened they responded to nothing. All they did was try to harm other around them; when bound they fought the bindings ceaselessly for days.

An investigating party was sent out. They carefully, cautiously tracked the path of the ill - the path that Shan Yu had taken into China, it turned out. Two weeks later one member of the party returned. His hair was in disarray, his clothes were torn and stained, and he had the wild-eyed look of a man who had seen hell.

"Demons!" he said. He described a great horde of demons wearing human flesh. He claimed that the demons were not stopped by bleeding out, or even cutting off their heads - while some could be stopped, he could see no pattern to it.

When asked what had happened to the others, he went white and said, "The demons touched them. Right here." He indicated his forehead. "It must make a gateway for another to enter the body. All of them are gone, now."

Some scoffed at his story. Hordes of demons? Really? Monsters which could live with their heads chopped off? Who had ever heard of such a thing?

Then more of them came. Dozens up them, stumbling along, backs stiff straight. Archers could stick twenty or thirty arrows in them before they fell. Setting them on fire didn't deter them in the least. Only a direct hit with a rocket could reliably knock them down.

Still, there weren't so many. The wall held to its purpose and kept them out.

Then they came by the hundreds. And then they came by the thousands. They came in such swarms that they knocked over the ones clawing at the wall and started to climb over them, making a human hill. Soldiers were brought in as fast as they could ride, but it was too much; the unyielding tenacity of the demons overwhelmed the wall. They fought their way onto its surface and pinned down the guards, touching their heads. And then the guards rose up and stumbled along with the rest.

The wall did not fall. But they made their way over it all the same.

The threat was recognized quickly. The emperor was evacuated to the south. His greatest generals met to decide how to face an enemy which had no strategy or even weapons beyond strange endurance and determination. The calls went out to bring in anyone who could help, and in came priests and monks and strategists.

This was also how Shang ended up on Mulan's doorstep again. "I've seen these creatures with my own eyes," he told her. "They're unearthly. We need your help."

"I'll give it," she vowed, and then after fruitlessly poking around at some books, she went to ask Mushu if he had ever heard of these things.

"Wait," Mushu said when she finished. "Did you just say that these _things_ look like people, but they're obsessed with touching heads, and they don't ever feel pain, and it's really hard to kill them, and they walk all funny?"

Mulan nodded.

"Oh, that's _not_ good, that's not good at _all_."

"What are they?"

Mushu sighed, and then he told her about creatures that he had heard about a very long time ago from a cousin of his who lived on the Tibetan plateau. "Basically, there's a bunch of different types of them depending on their weakness. Skin ones? That's easy, you just gotta cut them. Sounds like you have an infestation of mole ones - the only way to kill those is to hit them in a mole."

"You're kidding."

Mushu shook his head so hard that it undulated down to his tail.

Mulan tacked Khan up, said a quick good-bye to her family, and rode off alongside Shang. When they reached the capital, the horses were exhausted and visibly trembling, but there was no time to see that they would receive proper care; each second they stood still was another moment the creatures made their way south.

Several of the creatures had, at the risk of someone's life, been safely captured and brought to the alchemists and generals for experimentation. The first time Mulan saw one, she almost gagged. Its arm was rotting with gangrene, though it didn't seem to notice or care. Tied to its post, it simply gnawed at its chewed-off lips or wagged its ragged tongue, drifting this way and that towards the surrounding people. When Mulan stepped a little too close, it suddenly turned and lunged at her. After that, she made sure to stay at least three steps out of the limits of its bond.

She concocted a story about a legend she had read once. "There's five kinds, so if this is one of them, we need to figure out which one it is," she said as she finished.

A simple wound obviously hadn't yet killed it. Not a skin one, as Mushu had said.

They used a spear to open an artery and watch the blood pour out. The air was filled with a metallic scent and the flagstones were covered in crimson that soon faded to a distinctive red-brown. But the creature yet lived. Not a blood one.

Mulan looked away as several brave soldiers, wearing helmets, approached close enough to carve flesh off of its stomach with a sword. It struggled to touch their heads, but didn't seem to care about its belly even as its muscles were revealed and its gray organs started to peek through the wound. Not a flesh one.

They brought clubs and beat its remaining good arm until there was a cracking sound that made Mulan shudder. Still it tried to touch them with both the arm oozing with rot and the arm twisted in unnatural ways, giving no sign of pain. Not a bone one.

Mulan shuffled closer as they stripped it. She was the first one to spot the mole - a small thing on its lower back. With a cry, she darted forward and plunged a knife into the spot. The creature collapsed instantly.

Now there just appeared to be the corpse of some poor woman with a broken arm and carved-up belly and a rotting limb and a knife in her back, laying now on a layer of tacky, flaking dried blood. Mulan couldn't look for very long and backed off. Amongst the murmuring researchers, she slipped away. Shang joined her and took her to tea.

"We'll just have to deal with them one by one," she murmured, looking out onto a small garden, but she couldn't keep the heaviness out of her voice; from what Shang had said, that was going to be difficult.

But Mulan could do difficult.

Mulan led a group of soldiers from village to village, town to town, asking if anyone had seen strange demons which couldn't bend at the waist and didn't care for their own welfare. Sometimes there wasn't any sign of the creatures; more often, as they drew further north, there were several that the villagers had managed to trap in a barn.

Occasionally, there weren't any villagers left.

Each soldier wore a helmet, and they advised townspeople to cover their heads with cloth. When they hunted the creatures, groups of soldiers worked together to pin the demon down, strip it, and search for moles.

Little by little, it seemed that they were making progress. Each day they knocked down several creatures, and some days it was dozens.

And then they came upon a city that had been almost entirely taken over by the things, and as they rode up, each and every one turned its head towards them and started to walk.

There were only so many soldiers. They held off the demons as long as they could, while small groups drew off one or two at a time to knock down. But there were tens of thousands of the creatures, and there were only so many soldiers.

One man was surrounded. The creatures pawed at his helmet until it came off, and then all of them that could pressed their hands to his head. He shuddered, convulsed, and threw up his breakfast. The creatures lost interest as he collapsed and went to find a new victim. Several moments later, he blinked blank eyes open again and awkwardly levered himself up, his waist not bending.

The number of soldiers dwindled. They couldn't keep this up. It galled Mulan to do so, but she called for a retreat. The horses, who were gradually growing more frantic as the creatures closed in, were only too glad to gallop off.

Then they reached Chang'an. The creatures stumbled into the moat, clawed uselessly at the walls and gates as arrows found them, but still they came. The people of the city could hide behind the walls, but the food supplies dwindled as the tireless creatures continued their unwitting siege.

Soon, word reached Mulan that the emperor had been assassinated for failing to uphold the mandate of heaven and bringing this wretched curse on China. It hurt worse, though, when a messenger came to her, not meeting her eyes, and told her that General Shang had been lost in his duty protecting the people of China. At least he was not one of the creatures, though that was only a little comfort to her; he had been conscious long enough after he was attacked to put a knife into himself and slit his own throat.

In less than two months, they reached the sea. In their wake, China shook. There was yet time for them to finish spreading across the interior, and they would never displace humanity entirely. There would always be well-fortified villages and forts that grew enough to sustain themselves and never let the creatures build up enough to force themselves in past the walls. But China was no longer the kingdom at the center of the world.

Before that, though.

It was a sunny day. With only a few dozen men at arms with her, Mulan protected a small village from shortly after the sun rose until it was nearly set. A few villagers joined her, but for the most part they huddled in their homes, arms wrapped around their children.

Mulan was the last to fall. She fended off the creatures with a seemingly indefatigable vigor, dancing out of reach of their grasping arms and using her spear to knock them away. But even her arms grew tired, and her legs began to stumble, and still the tireless horde advanced upon her.

As she fell under the closing circle of the demons, the remaining villagers ran.

When they reached a nearby fort that was not currently besieged, they begged their way in and told this story: of all the corpse-like figures that had chased them, Mulan was not among them. At the very last moment, they said, when hope was finally lost for her, she plunged a knife into a mole on her leg and lit a large sack of gunpowder that lay under her clothes. The explosion had taken out at least a half dozen of the creatures and the smoke had followed the retreating villagers for almost a li. Fa Mulan died a hero, they said.

* * *

A/N: The creatures are known as ro-langs, aka Tibetan zombies.  
Chang'an - an old capital of China.


End file.
